Football Manager for PS4 and Xbox One “not ruled out”

Sports Interactive has revealed it has “not ruled out” Football Manager on Xbox One and PS4.

Despite the developer’s focus on PC and mobile platforms, it hasn’t completely ruled out doing a version of the game for the new-gen PS4 and Xbox One consoles.

“We haven’t ruled them out entirely, we’ve said at the moment there are no plans,” said Miles Jacobson, Studio Director of developer Sports Interactive talking to TrustedReviews.

He said that there are multiple reasons for the decision at the moment, with the main one being finances.

“When we released on the Xbox 360, it didn’t do that well. So, we don’t think there’s that great a market for it. Particularly until the consoles are more mass market, rather than the hard core gamer who has picked them up so far. For a game like ours there wouldn’t be much point because financially it would cripple us.”

Sports Interactive also believes that Football Manager doesn’t really lend itself to controller-based gameplay. Touch screen controls work well for the mobile version, but the game it primarily designed for keyboard and mouse control.

Thirdly, it’s to do with the way that Football Manager is played.

“When the 360 version came out and the last one came out, we actually did a lot of research into why it didn’t do that well. The thing that kept coming up over and over again is that because the average play session time on Football Manager is so high (we’re around 200 hours with Football Manager 14 average play time).

“Taking over a living room as you would do with a console game is very hard to do for that length of time. When people are playing it on a computer or laptop that isn’t the main screen in the house.”

Football Manager 15 is out today, November 7 for PC and Mac.Read more: Best games 2014